http://www.tennessean.com/local/archives/01/04/05331119.shtml?Element_ID=5331119
Tuesday, 05/29/01
Woman shoots kidnapper who killed her mother By NOBLE SPRAYBERRY
and JIM EAST
Staff Writers

A Nashville woman kidnapped by her ex-boyfriend shot him to death
outside a Dalton, Ga., truck stop yesterday morning, less than four
hours after the man killed her mother, Metro police said.

”It would have been the last thing you would have thought of – the
kidnap victim would end up killing the assailant,” Metro Homicide
detective Brad Corcoran said last night after he returned from Georgia.

The bizarre Memorial Day events included a daylight shooting on a
suburban street, a high-tech pursuit across state lines and a deadly
burst of semiautomatic gunfire that ended the kidnapping victim’s
ordeal.
Corcoran identified the dead as:

. Sylvia Butts, 53, of 704 Robert Burns Drive, near Briley Parkway and
Murfreesboro Road. The mother of the kidnapping victim, she had been
shot once in the back at about 7:50 a.m.

. Ricky Tillman, 30, of 5800 Maudina Drive. Corcoran said Tillman -
a 6-foot, 4-inch, 240-pound truck driver – was shot once in the side
of his head and three times in the back. Police identified him as the
kidnapper of Butts’ daughter, Alisha Cox.

Cox, 35, was hospitalized at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. She
was transferred there last night with a back injury suffered when she
jumped from a window of her mother’s home in an effort to elude Tillman.

Corcoran, who interviewed Cox yesterday, pieced together a chilling
account of the homicide and kidnapping:

”The suspect comes over to her house to see Alisha and calls them on
the cell phone and says he’s there,” Corcoran said. ”She tells her
mother, ‘He’s outside, I don’t want to see him.’ Momma goes outside to
tell him. . That is when he shot and killed Ms. Butts.”

Cox barricaded herself in a bathroom on the second floor, then jumped
out the bathroom window to elude Tillman when he came looking for her,
Corcoran said.

”When she hits (the ground) she’s got a fracture of the spine from
jumping out of that window. She tries to make it across the street to a
neighbor’s house, but he catches her out in the street and puts a gun to
her body and forces her into the truck,” Corcoran said.

”From that point they leave, go Interstate 24 and stop in Murfreesboro,
where he picked up a trailer. He stole a trailer thinking he would throw
everybody (searching for him) off because he knew we’d be looking for
the cab.”

Ordinarily, Cox’s 10-year-old daughter would have been at her
grandmother’s home, too, but she spent the holiday with a classmate’s
family in Alabama, Corcoran said.

Authorities contacted the owner of Tillman’s truck, and the company was
able to track it by satellite with a Global Positioning System that
reported the vehicle’s location every two minutes, Corcoran said. Then
the company told police the truck had been sitting idle at a Pilot
Travel Center in Dalton for 20 minutes.
Whitfield County Sheriff Scott Chitwood told The [Dalton] Daily
Citizen-News that when Tillman went inside the truck stop to pick up
food and beverages, Cox was able to free herself of the belts and socks
that Tillman had used to tie her up. She grabbed the semiautomatic
handgun Tillman had left in the truck and leapt from the cab as Tillman
came out of the store.

”He confronted her, and we believe made an aggressive move toward her,
at which time she began shooting,” Chitwood said.

Chitwood said Cox appeared to have acted in self-defense, and Corcoran
said Georgia authorities told him they consider Tillman’s death
justifiable homicide. Cox had not been charged last night in the
shooting.

This report includes material from The Associated Press and The Daily
Citizen-News.

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